“Get her out, Pat, before she becomes bait,” Sherlock bent down with the camera hanging from his neck to check the bruises.
Pat slipped into the water from the other side of the dock. He opened the SKED, loosened the straps, and slipped it under the body. The firefighter unwound the hook from her hair and caught the SKED, while Pat strapped the body in place.
Sherlock and one firefighter pulled the SKED onto the dock, as Pat pushed from the water. It moved easily, splashing water as it came to a rest. Pat lifted himself from the water.
“Does anyone know her?” Chief Richard Dowley asked from a gathering of police officers and firefighters. He moved forward and bent down to examine her. “Sherlock, what are these?”
“It looks like rope burns on her neck, Chief.”
“Like in a hanging?”
“Be my guess right now.”
“How’d she get into the water? You don’t hang yourself and then walk into the bight.”
Sherlock took close up photos of her throat and didn’t answer the chief’s question because it didn’t need one.
Paramedics rolled a gurney to the finger dock; an opened body bag lay on it. Wearing latex gloves, the firemen and two paramedics un-strapped the body from the SKED and moved it into the body bag. They lifted the unzipped bag and strapped it to the gurney.
“You meetin’ us at the hospital?” a paramedic asked Sherlock.
“Give me a half hour,” he said. “Pat, dive the dock, talk to Mick, and figure out where he found her?”
“Sure.”
“Look for anything interesting, clothing, rope …”
Sherlock checked the body quickly, but carefully; he scraped something from beneath the nails on one hand, and sealed whatever it was in a small plastic bag. He zipped the body bag and the paramedics rolled the gurney away.
“Mick, I need to talk to you,” Richard straightened his sunglasses.
“I need him first.” Pat slid the small air tank on. “Tide’s comin’ in, right?”
“Yeah,” I was still dripping water from my short swim. “Be high at nine.”
“About where was she, when you first saw her?”
“No more than ten feet off the bow.”
“Current bring her in?”
“She was floating with it.”
“Did you hear anything, before you saw her?” Richard moved toward us.
“No, it was quiet. I brewed coffee, walked up and bought the paper, came back, poured a cup, came on deck and saw her.”
Richard looked off toward the access cut, maybe forty feet wide that allowed access to Garrison Bight from the Gulf of Mexico. To the right of the cut was Hilton Haven, an area of million dollar homes, and to the left was Navy housing. On the other side of the cut was Rat Island, home to vagrant boaters, and close to the city’s mooring field, where live-aboard boaters occupied most of the moorings.
“Could she have come from the moorings or Rat Island?” Richard continued to stare.
“I don’t think so.” While keeping her from floating away, I had thought about where she could have come from, instead of what I was doing. “The charter boats leave early, and one of them would’ve seen the body.”
Charter boats take tourists out to the Gulf Stream for a day’s fishing, usually leaving at first light.
Pat dropped into the water and swam to where the body had been. “Here?” he yelled.
“Close enough.”
Pat went under, to begin his search.
“I want you to come to the station,” Richard put his hand on my shoulder. “Go change.”
“All I did was find her, I didn’t …”
“I have something to show you,” his expression became serious. “It involves her, the floater.” He turned away. “Don’t be long,” Richard walked toward the parking lot without turning back.
• • •
After a quick shower, I put on a pair of cargo shorts, a T-shirt, my faded pre-World Series Red Sox’s ball cap, flip-flops, and rode my bike to the police station.
“Do you recognize her?” I was seated in Richard’s office when he handed me a fax sheet with four color photos of the floater that were taken while she was alive. One could have been a driver’s license photo, the others were more spontaneous. No information appeared on the page.
“She was pretty,” I gave him back the fax, becoming upset because someone had stolen more than life from her, they stole her future. “Where’s the cover sheet with her name and rap sheet?”
“No rap sheet,” he hesitated before picking up a few sheets of paper from his desk.
“Someone’s princess trying to find excitement in Paradise?” If she had a scandalous background, maybe I would get past being upset.
“You’re an unsympathetic son-of-a-bitch,” Richard slid the sheets across his desk.
They were in English and Spanish and had the seal of the Colombian government’s Departmento Administrativo de Seguridad, its secret police. Another sheet was from the DEA. I read the English first and then scanned the Spanish to see if it translated correctly.
Her name was Gabriela Luisa Morales, a thirty-one year old Colombian. She was becoming a real person and I didn’t need that.
“How’d she go missing?”
“She’s was an undercover agent for the Colombians,” Richard said. “Our DEA in Colombia knew and trusted her, she gave them a lead that brought her from Bogotá to Miami and that’s where they lost her.”
“And you are telling me this because?”
“You’re involved.” He sipped from a cup of coffee.
“With her?” The accusation surprised me. “You don’t believe that.”
“No.” Richard smiled, walked out of the office and returned with two cups of coffee, he put one in front of me. “You know the people who live at the bight,” he sat down. “I don’t have a cop here that knows the live-aboard community like you do. By noon I’ll have the Feds converging on my office.”
“DEA?”
“Yeah,” he sipped coffee, “and Colombian DEA and they’ll wanna know what happened. They confided in me, they expect something in return.”
“What’s her story?” The coffee was horrible, even with two sugars. “Why was she in Miami?”
He told me.
Years ago rightwing Colombian militias hired Israeli mercenaries to train them, so they could protect certain haciendas from the leftist guerillas. As the militias became successful, they began to work with Colombian drug cartels, which used the protected haciendas as transportation centers. One of the mercenaries was actually a Brit, Neville Cluny, who quickly realized there was more money in drugs than in war. He became sociable with the drug lords and was soon their security chief for the cocaine’s long trek from Colombia to Miami.
Gabriela met the mercenaries because of her contacts with the cartels. She recognized Neville’s plan and wormed her way into his trust. Being bright and pretty didn’t hurt, either.
“How does all this lead to Key West?” I left the coffee untouched.
“Don’t know,” he frowned. “But it led here because you found her body.”
“And the Limy?”
“He’s vanished too.”
“Maybe he’s dead.”
“Possible, but you didn’t find him, so maybe he caught on to her.”
“I was thinking of how she died.” I had spent too much time thinking about her. “If looks are right, and Sherlock’s right, she was hung. You saw the marks on her neck.”
Richard nodded, halfheartedly.
“How do you hang someone around here without being noticed? If you wanted to hang a person on a tree at Bayveiw Park to set an example, you’d leave the body, I can see that.” I picked up the fax sheet with her photos. Unlike the dead eyes I had seen in the morning, in the photos her large brown eyes seemed to sparkle, impish like, and there was even a sprinkling of freckles across her nose.
“It had to happen in the bight, can you ask around, see what you can fi
nd out?” He mumbled and tried to smile, “This is between us. Only a couple of my officers know what’s really going on.”
Richard wouldn’t say more, so I left to see what I could find out about the murder of a young woman I had never known.
• • •
I rode my bike by Schooner Wharf Bar at the Historic Seaport. The traffic was mid-morning light and the sun had risen halfway to its noon high. The temperature was climbing too. Young girls with ponytails, bronze tans, and bikinis, laughed as they washed down the Sebago catamaran, spraying each other in the process, while preparing for an afternoon sail and snorkeling trip full of tourists.
Seagulls and pelicans rested on pilings, waiting for the afternoon arrival of the seaport’s few remaining charter boats and their free meal. Six-foot tarpon skimmed the surface, looking for handouts in competition with the seabirds. Small groups of tourists wandered along the wooden dock, stopping to gawk at the tarpon and the classic ships that rested in their slips.
“Mick,” someone called my name as I rode by the bar.
The tables in the dirt and pebble courtyard of the driftwood-built Schooner Wharf Bar were mostly empty, but at the open-air bar, the remainder of the Breakfast Club sat nursing beers. Padre Thomas sat at one of the tall, thatched-rooftop tables in the sunny courtyard with someone I didn’t know. He waved me over.
Thomas is one of the eccentric characters that call the end of the road home and he enriches Key West’s uniqueness. Irish born, and raised in Boston, he was a Catholic missionary in Guatemala until the day he claims angels told him to walk away. He says he sees and talks to angels and I sometimes believe him.
He sat with a tall, lanky guy with bushy sun-streaked hair that could have been an Afro if he had been African-American. They had Styrofoam coffee cups in front of them.
“Mick, this is an old friend from Guatemala,” he stood and slapped the man’s shoulder. “Coco Joe, meet my friend Mad Mick Murphy.”
Coco Joe stood, he had to be six-foot, and smiled as we shook hands.
“Visiting?” I sat down with them.
“No,” Padre Thomas answered, “he’s playing at the Hog.”
The Hog’s Breath Saloon is one of my hangouts. “You’re with the California band?”
“Yeah, we just drove down from Atlanta, from another gig,” he kept a smile on his boyish face.
“You don’t sound Guatemala.”
He laughed. “No, I worked with Padre Thomas as a Peace Corps volunteer, years ago,” Coco Joe turned to Thomas and his smile got larger. “Hey, dudes, I need to check in at the club and then get some sleep. It was nice meetin’ you.”
He picked up his bulky backpack as we shook hands; Coco Joe and Thomas hugged like brothers, and then he headed toward Duval Street, a distinct limp to his right leg.
“Looks awful young to have been in the Peace Corps when you were in Guatemala,” I sat down.
“Yes, his boyish looks can fool you,” Padre Thomas smiled. “He was a good kid down there, a lot of help to the villagers.” He sipped his coffee.
“Where’d he get the limp?”
“He was shot by a soldier when he helped the villagers, but he doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“Why Coco Joe?” When the time was right Padre Thomas would tell me the story of the shooting, because I didn’t believe Peace Corps members got shot. “At least you can’t say his name without smiling.”
“I don’t know, he was Coco Joe when I met him. Once I overheard him say an uncle called him that and it stuck. I guess it’s a California thing,” he hunched his shoulders with a who-knows expression on his face. “He’s playing at 10:30 p.m., can you come by?”
“I’ll try, Padre.” I went to stand, but he held up his hand and motioned me to sit.
“Something I can do for you?”
“I know about this morning,” he pulled a wrinkled package of Camels from his shirt pocket, took a bent cigarette out, and lit it.
“What about this morning?” I returned his roguish smile.
“Not a believer today?” he exhaled smoke.
“I believe in a lot things this morning, Padre. What do you believe in?”
“I believe you care about the young woman,” he took a long drag on the cigarette and crushed out the stub. “I believe you feel a responsibility to her, though you never knew her.”
“If I plead ignorance …”
“Ah,” he shook his head slowly, forced a smile and found the old brogue, “would a nice Irish Catholic boy lie to a man of the cloth?”
We both laughed, but it was with sadness, not humor.
“You wanna know what I know?”
“Of course,” he lit another cigarette.
“I know her name and that she was an undercover agent for the Colombian DEA,” I wished I had a cigar. “She disappeared from Miami and I found her floating just before seven this morning.”
“You didn’t mention she’d been murdered, hung to be exact,” he inhaled, let the cigarette dangle from his lips, and exhaled smoke through his narrow nose.
I looked at him and wanted to be surprised by what he said, but wasn’t. He didn’t get his information from officials, but I thought he might have overheard someone talking at the bar. Otherwise, he’d have me believing in angels, again.
“Thomas, I need to know how you know this. It could be important.”
He sipped from a Styrofoam cup as he stubbed out the cigarette. “You know how I know it, Mick.”
I pulled closer to him. “If you overheard someone talking, I need to know.”
I had a feeling I didn’t want to hear his answer.
“I overheard no one, Mick,” he pulled the cigarette package out of his pocket, but didn’t take a cigarette. “At five-thirty this morning, my vision came.”
“The angels?”
He nodded, his face lost all expression and his pale gray eyes widened. “I saw the girl gagging for breath, her hands scratching at the rope around her neck, as she hung from a tree. I saw the two men toss her into the water. I saw you on your boat.” His knuckles turned white, he held onto the table so fiercely. “I know you care and don’t understand why.”
“Wait a minute, Padre,” I moved closer. “You said a tree, what tree? Where?”
“I don’t know, somewhere close,” finally he let the table go, pulled a cigarette from the package, and lit it. “Close to the water,” he inhaled deeply, “close to your boat.”
“Padre, if I take this information to the cops they’re gonna come looking for you,” I said out of frustration. “And we both know they aren’t big believers in angels.”
“But you believe me, right?”
“I know you didn’t kill her, Padre, that’s all I know.”
“You can find the killer from what I’ve told you.”
“The police think she was hung from a mast and dumped in the water.”
“That’s not what happened,” he took another long drag on his cigarette.
“Well, Padre, a mast or tree, it means little to her, right now. I promised to check around the marina and see if anyone heard or saw anything strange,” I stood and pulled my bike from the next table. “Did the angels show you Bayveiw Park?”
“No, Mick, it was a lone tree in a yard,” he stubbed out the cigarette in a full ashtray. “You’re wasting your time at the marina.”
“I’ll see you tonight, Padre.” I peddled my bike toward Harpoon Harry’s, hoping to catch some of the marina locals having breakfast.
“I’d like that, Mick,” he lit another cigarette and walked toward the water.
• • •
Richard met me at El Siboney, our favorite Cuban restaurant, for lunch. We sat at the counter, to avoid the busy restaurant and spoke quietly.
“An autopsy report come in?” I drank my café con leche, a mixture of strong Cuban espresso, milk, and lots of sugar.
“Not an official one,” Richard sipped his glass of homemade sangria. “They found a little saltwater
in her lungs.”
“She drowned?”
“No, her epiglottis relaxed when she died, so water was able to get into her lungs,” he played with the glass of spiced wine. “The way her head was angled allowed the water in, but it wasn’t enough to drown her.”
“Broken neck, then?”
“Unofficially for now, yeah. The medical examiner agrees with Sherlock,” he took a drink. “But she put up a fight, she had someone’s skin under her nails.”
“DNA?”
“Too early, this ain’t TV, Mick.”
“I know,” I sipped the con leche. “I’ve got nothing. I checked a lot of bight residents at Harpoon’s, even mooring field people.” I held back what Padre Thomas had told me. Richard didn’t like him, thought there was more to Thomas than a renegade priest.
“Well, the DEA is here and working with the FDLE,” he glanced at the menu. “Why do I read the menu, I always order the same thing.”
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is a state police agency that assists small community police forces. They have the labs and technology that are too expensive for small police department budgets.
“Colombian agents too?”
We ordered arroz con pollo, yellow rice cooked with pieces of chicken mixed in.
“Two Colombians,” he said as the waitress left. “The feds have taken over the investigation.”
“What about the Limey?”
“They don’t think he or any of the cartel are still here,” he took a sip of wine. “They assume the cartel caught on to her true identity, killed her here and went on their way.”
“Do you believe that?”
“It makes sense, Mick,” he looked straight ahead. “You kill someone in Key West and move on. They’re smugglers, not street sellers.”
Our food came, I ordered a Dos Eques beer to go with it and avoided explaining to Richard that he was wrong and Padre Thomas’ angels were probably right.
• • •
I lit the first cigar of the day and rode my bike back to Garrison Bight. The water was calm, so I took my dinghy to the mooring field, and when I found someone on board a vessel, I asked if they heard anything out of the ordinary around sunrise. Most wanted to know why and I told them about finding the body, but little else. No one heard anything. Sound travels on the open water and if she had put up a fight, especially a verbal one, someone would have heard it; I might have even heard it, but I hadn’t.
Vampire Slayer Murdered in Key West - Mick Murphy Short Stories Page 5